<p>i’m not a US citizen and i’m paying income tax on my stipend, so… you probably will have to pay tax, whether you’re a citizen or not. the taxes are high in my state too (pennsylvania).</p>
<p>stanford and USC get a decent portion of their funding from alumni donations. those alumni aren’t donating right now. they’ve also invested their endowments in the stock market and lost a good bit of their money (harvard, for example, lost 22% of its endowment last year). so private schools are also feeling the brunt of the bad economy and this will likely result in grad students getting offers without funding, or schools offering fewer acceptances, only taking on the grad students they can fund.</p>
<p>you said you wanted to pay for your degree yourself, which i think is a bad idea personally, but i know that UK schools don’t give grad funding (at least not for masters degrees), so it probably doesn’t strike you as terribly unusual to pay out of pocket for an MS.</p>